Elizabeth Tobey: The hallways of Firaxis are fairly quiet these days – the time before beta, when everyone has their head down and is working tirelessly to perfect the upcoming game. But the walls of studio are lined with artwork – from concept sketches to renders in almost every phase of polish – because Civilization V does not lack style. From the UI to the elaborately designed unit icons, art was a major focus for the game’s creators.
In our second episode of the Civilization V podcast series, I sit down with Dorian Newcomb, Lead Artist, and Arne Schmidt, Building and Structures Lead, and discuss how they created the look of the game. To begin, I lob a big one at Dorian and ask him to explain to me what was his major objective when designing the game.
Dorian Newcomb: Wow. We had a series of objectives and the two I think that relate to the world the best are that we wanted the world to look vast and diverse so when you looked across the landscape you’d see a wide range of textures and shapes and colors and as you explored different regions of the world you would discover more continents, different types of vegetation, just more stuff. And then as you played the game and as you developed your civilization the hope would as you improved your land you’d be transforming the chaos into something more ordered. And that’s a lot of what Arne was bringing in. So I give him these large goals – “hey make chaos into order.” And then he makes things happen.
Arne Schmidt: And then on top of that, he also asked us to make it look both believable and somewhat romanticized. So a lot of it has been sort of trying to take somewhat differing ideals and make the two things work together. One of the things we’ve sort of said is that we want Civ V to look kind of like the Hollywood version of history in that everything is glitzy and glamorous and it’s not gritty and dark like the dark ages. We want it to be a journey you want to go on.
ET: That look Arne talks about – the Hollywood version of history – has another term in the studio. Some call it Works Progress (which may evoke many different images for those of you who are history buffs.) This design concept helped guide the look and feel of the game tremendously.
DN: We actually have a few different terms that we throw around when we were describing the art style of the game. So our initial inspiration was historical fiction and Hollywood epics. From that idea of playing through history, as we approached other parts of the game we decided to take on visuals that matched our history that tend to be important in history. So we have a bunch of wonder paintings and those are displayed as 19th century romanticized history paintings. And when it came to the interface, there were two different parts to the interface. There’s the framing elements and those are the things that – outline, the button shapes, the colors – and a form of architecture that’s really successful in compartmentalizing parts is art deco. And so we knew that we wanted to have art deco inspiration as the way that we would frame the game. But within those panels and the illustrations that you saw, it was really exciting. The WPA arts movement that happened when Roosevelt was trying to get America out of the depression had great poster images and very good reads at a glance and we know that we want people to look at the button and understand exactly what it is right away. And so it was a combination of the art deco style and the WPA styling interface that I was really excited about putting together. And once we put it together it just seemed to fit and we didn’t need to look at it again, just go with it.
ET: This grand art style really does echo the basis of the game, because Civilization is not just a strategy series. It is a game where you control history and mold famous empires to your own particular style. While history is the backbone of this game, you have the power to remake time. But beyond that feeling and power of being the master of history and time, the world had to look believable – the ground, trees, and water all feel very real and organic. Balancing that realism with the Hollywood ideal was no easy task.
AS: Well I’m predominantly responsible for cities. One of the things we tried to do with cities is that in previous Civs cities pretty much start in the center of a square and just grow straight out in all directions and we’re trying to change that. We’re trying to give it a road network. We’re trying to have it relate to the terrain. So if you build a city on the coast it actually sits on the coast. And a lot of this was helped by the way that the world looks because we used hexes instead of squares. No matter how you lay out a square grid the human eye will always tell you it is a square grid. But as soon as you add those two extra sides to every tile, everything starts looking more organic. And a little bit of variation in any given line going along those six sides stops looking like a pre-planned line. So the whole world looks more organic and diverse than it’s ever looked before and now we’re putting cities inside that organic environment that look more specific and in place in that world than they’ve ever looked before.
DN: In a lot of ways this involved trust with the programmers as we were trying things that an artist on their own couldn’t just put into a game. We showed a lot of concepts, we had a lot of conversations with some very smart, almost brilliant - maybe brilliant, I’ll give them brilliant – programmers. And they would say well if you want this look, it will take me a few months to implement this series of very complex names that I can’t give you right now. That’ll be another podcast. And what we would do is we would make the art in pieces the way that you’d put together just about any game. But they’d arrange it in a way that was based on concepts and create that variety and that excitement level. But if we didn’t have a good trust relationship and if we weren’t communicating the same ideas we would have never gotten such a stellar look.
AS: In fact this is the – of all the games I’ve ever worked on – this has been the one where I’ve had the most back and forth interaction with a programmer who was helping me make my art look the way I wanted it to in the game but also have it look unique every time you see it. Previously, again, if you get back to a square grid it makes things look the same every time. So it’s very easy to go to a programmer and say, “ok on this square grid I want it to look this way” and they’re gonna make it look exactly that way. But now that we’ve got this much more organic world we have a lot more flexibility in what we can do so the programmers are having to take on sort of an artistic concept which we’re kind of guiding them in how to realize in the game. So there’s been a lot of back and forth between the two disciplines, much more so than on any previous project I’ve worked on.
ET: Making an organic and believable world is one enormous task in its own right, but Civilization V required more than just a static, believable world. You begin at the dawn of time and go far into the future over the course of the game, and the art had to change significantly to evoke that movement through the ages.
AS: Well there’s two ways that that happens. It grows in time chronologically and then as you get more advanced the world gets more advanced, your buildings and improvements and units get more technologically advanced. But as the same time, as you’re exploring the world, we’ve made it so that the various continents look very different from each other. So you may start the game with one set of colors being the predominant set, you cross a small stretch of ocean and all of a sudden the landscape looks totally different. The lighting will be different, the colors of the trees, the ground, everything about the world evolves as you’re moving through it. So there’s sort of two paths to how the game looks different as you progress through it. The things you’ve already revealed update through time and the things that you haven’t revealed are different as you encounter them.
DN: As far as changing the look as well. You know, Civ is a game not just where you have battles or where you build cities but it’s also a game where every part of the landscape you’re gonna want to develop and change. And so early on with the road networks as Arne was describing we started to add farms and even pretty early on as you’re playing it looks like a wilderness and it gets transformed into beautiful farmland country and you have, you know, spices in rows and wine in rows that are being developed. And just that alone, cultivating the land and seeing the players decisions change everything about the terrain that they’re on I think is pretty compelling.
ET: Compelling is a very modest way to encapsulate the look Arne and Dorian have achieved with Civilization V. From an outsider who has tinkered with the different builds as they creep closer and closer to the final version, watching the world grow and change around me is nothing short of awesome. You have total control over the landscape, and want to honor the ground that your civilization grows out of, and through all the details beyond the game itself – from the tiniest detail on the HUD to the changing icons of units and buildings – the art style more than successfully creates a compelling world that you want to spend tens (or in my case hundreds) of hours immersed in.
I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and this concludes the second episode of the Civilization V podcast series. We’ll be back next time to take a closer look at the characters of the game.
i guess that might maybe be too much.
